— With every other row removed, reducing its capacity to 160 from 520, the auditorium at the Barrington Stage Company’s main theater here seems about as serious as a gaptoothed 8-year-old.
“Chester Bailey,” the company’s first indoor production since the pandemic began, is as striking as a sucker punch, too effective to let you keep an emotional distance, even if you’re at a social one.
“Chester Bailey,” by Joseph Dougherty, is set mostly in a Long Island mental hospital in 1945, where its title character, a Brooklyn man in his mid-20s, is recovering from a horrendous attack by a fellow worker at a wartime shipyard.
In a series of bedside interviews, the doctor gradually figures out how the injured man’s brain pieces together sounds, social cues, phantom sensations, bits of previously acquired knowledge and an almost painterly imagination to guess what the world around him is like.
No detail is left dangling; if the hospital is named for Walt Whitman, the Good Gray Poet will eventually, and a bit laboriously, be woven into the material.
For a play set in a mental hospital, the psychology here is thus rather thin, which you discover only when your mind wanders during the occasional longueur or you recap the plot during the car ride home.
Letting more than a third of the play’s 90 minutes elapse before the two characters have a real scene together is a way of manipulating information that might otherwise have given away the game too soon.
In fact, the play’s tactics annoyed me only once, near the end, when one of its mysteries was resolved with a distasteful device: an all-too-familiar monster ex machina.
The set — a series of industrial archways by Beowulf Boritt — does a lot of thematic work, variously suggesting the steel girders of the old Penn Station, the skeleton of a warship and the receding depths of the human imagination.
None of that would matter without fine performances, and the father-son casting, which in the abstract seemed gimmicky, turns out to be highly effective.
Tamping down any vocal dramatics and letting his body speak for him, he finds a way to express the envy, doubt, deviousness and even sexual pride that Cotton can hardly put into words by putting them into postures instead.
His performance reminds you that acting, too, is a form of delusion, not so different from the kind in the play.
And now I’m speaking not only of the actor’s imagination, but the audience’s.